Macs Infected by Ad-Injecting Malware

Below:

Next story in Tech and gadgets

Apple is more popular now than it has ever been but success
brings its own share of problems. Macs used to be the go-to
virus-free platform, but that's not because it's any harder to
develop antagonistic software for them. Rather, it's because more
people used Windows. Now that the numbers are (slowly) shifting,
Mac's OS X has attracted a few nasty Trojans.

The most recent of these harmful programs is actually far less
obtrusive than most, but still probably not something you'd want
on your machine. Trojan.Yontoo.1 is a Mac-centric piece of
malware that plugs into Safari, Chrome or Firefox and starts
displaying persistent ads. These ads cause no apparent harm
beyond hogging system resources, but even if a user never clicks
on them, they generate money for their unscrupulous creators.

The Trojan can spread in a variety of ways, but it usually
involves asking users to install media player plug-ins to view
video content on suspicious websites. After promising to install
an app called "Free Twit Tube," Yontoo loads up instead and will
display ads for dubious Apple accessories until the user scrubs
his or her system clean.

The standard rules apply for keeping junk like Yontoo off your
system: Watch video at reliable sites (a "Simpsons" clip on
YouTube is trustworthy; a site from a country you've never heard
of promising free episodes of " Game
of Thrones " is probably not), and don't install software or
plug-ins without verifying them first. If you don't know what a
program does, taking a few seconds to look it up could save you a
lot of headaches later on. [See also:
The 10 Biggest Online Security Myths — And How to Avoid Them ]

If you've been taken in by the Yontoo scheme, aside from having
generated a few pennies for hackers, you have nothing to worry
about. Any good malware sweep will recognize it as a standard
adware plug-in and wipe it as such.

Simply displaying ads may not sound like a very ambitious plan
when compared with malware that steals users' financial
information or completely destroys their files, but it's a much
more ingenious plan in the long run. Faced with the prospect of a
malfunctioning computer or relatively unobtrusive ads,
a user is far more likely to treat the first than the second.